On Aug. 5, 2017, China complied with a United Nations decision and formally imposed sanctions on North Korea, including a ban on seafood exports. Seafood, particularly squid, is one of North Korea’s few significant foreign-exchange earners, and the sanctions were expected to increase the pressure on the regime.
But just a few weeks after the ban came into effect, hundreds of squid-fishing vessels left Chinese waters and rounded the southern tip of South Korea. They entered North Korea’s 200 nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ), nearly doubling the number of Chinese fishing vessels operating there from 557 to 907, according a recent Global Fishing Watch report that tracked data from four different satellite systems. Even as China publicly claimed that is was complying with sanctions, many of the Chinese vessels continued to make trips to North Korea and back, including several round trips each year during both 2018 and 2019, said Jaeyoon Park, one of the report’s lead authors.
